Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check wasGustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.
Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.
Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial,i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the MoravianDiminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.
But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[10]and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.
Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profoundearthlylife." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers, whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with admiration.
The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.
After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.
Such miserable circumstantialities as,e. g., the purveying of the wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very well--I say; he did not command, but simplyaccustomedandnarrated. He nevercontradictedeither himself or the child; nay, he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself. Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest, the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).
To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed; and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus, lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud, drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses andBlessedones, of whom we shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type! As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around the little one thisOrbis Pictusof good men, as the Almighty Genius builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the drawingbefore, but onlyafterthe description, because hearing attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing. Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art ofapprehendingbeautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords: nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.
And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes did not reach out beyond his acquisitions of knowledge, and neither a fear nor a murmur distracted his peaceful soul. The Genius was happy; for the execution of this ten years' building plan was easier for him than the resolving upon it; the resolution conjures up at once all difficulties and deprivations before the soul. But the execution puts them far asunder and gives us the first real interest in it through the peculiar pleasure without which, in a thousand things, one's patience would be exhausted--that of seeing something daily growing under one's hands.
For both of them it was a good thing that down below there in this moral forcing-house dwelt also a schoolmate of Gustavus's, who was at the same time a half collaborator and adjutant of the Genius, who, however, by reason of certain defects of his heart derived from the whole education but a slim advantage, although he, as well as Gustavus, belonged to the class of animals with two heart-chambers and with warm blood. If I say that the greatest fault of the fellow-laborer was, that he would not drink brandy, one sees plainly that he had to be, not like Gustavus, trainedup, but traineddown,[11]because he was the neatest, blackest of--poodles that ever sprang round over the earth with a white breast. This intelligent dog and assistant teacher often relieved and released the head-master in play hours; besides, most of the virtues could be less well practisedbyhim than by Gustavusuponhim, and he kept for that purpose the necessaryheteronymousvices ready:--in sleep the school-colleague easily snapped about him at living legs, in his waking hours at those which had been plucked off.
In this subterranean America, the three Antipodes had their day,i. e., a lamp lighted, when with us overhead it was night--their night,i. e., sleep, they had when with us the sun shone. The fair Genius had so arranged it on account of external noises and for the sake of his daily excursions. At that time, while his teacher enjoyed air and society, the little one lay down there in his monastery, withbandagedeyes, for chance and the cellar-door were not to be trusted. Sometimes he carried the sleeping veiled angel up into the fresh air and into the inspiring sunshine, as ants submit their larvæ to the brooding wings of the sun. Verily, were I a second or third Chodowiecky, I would at this moment stand up and engrave the scene for my own book in Swedish copper, not merely to depict how our pale red darling brought out into the open air slumbers under his bandage in a latticed rose-shadow, and like a dead angel lies before us in the infinite Temple of Nature, peacefully reposing with little dreams of his little cavern--there is something still more beautiful--thou still hast thy parents, Gustavus, and dost not see them; thy father, who stands beside thee, his eye bedimmed with love, and rejoices over the pure breathing that heaves thy little breast, and forgets in his joy at that how thou art being educated--and thy mother, who presses to thy face, on which lies the two-fold innocence of solitude and childhood, the love-hungering eyes which remain unsatisfied because they must not speak nor fondle. But she is pressing thee out of thy slumber, and thou must after a short time go down again to thy Plato's Cave.
The Genius had long been preparing him for the resurrection from his holy sepulchre. He said to him: "If thou art very good and not impatient, and lovest me and the poodle right well, then thou mayest die. When thou hast died, then I will die too, and we will go to heaven" (by which he meant the surface of the earth); "there it is right beautiful and magnificent. There they kindle no light in the day time, but one as large as my head stands in the air above thee and moves all day around thee beautifully--the roof of the great room is blue, and so high that no man can reach it with a thousand ladders--and the floor is soft and green, and, what is finer still, the poodles are there as large as our chamber. In heaven all is full of blessed ones, and there are all the good people, of whom I have so often told thee, and thy parents" (whose likenesses he had long since given him), "to whom thou art as dear as thou art to me, and who will give thee everything. But thou must be very good." "Ah! when, then, are we going, at last, to die?" said the little one, and his glowing fancy labored within him, and at every such description he ran up to a landscape painting and touched and interrogated every spear of grass.
Nothing acts so feebly upon children as a threat or a hope which is not fulfilled before evening. Only so long as one talks to them beforehand of a future examination or of their mature age, is it of any avail; hence many repeat this prefatory talk so often that it no longer leaves even a momentary impression. The Genius therefore constructed the long way to the greatest reward out of lesser ones, all which strengthened the impression and the certainty of the great one, and which will be found in the following section.
Apropos! I must repeat, that of all evils as regards education and children, in comparison with which the so much decried spelling-and-whipping-system is golden, there is none more poisonous, no more unwholesome mispickel, (or arsenical pyrite), and no more consuming pedagogical tape-worm than a French nurse.
In all the fibres of my memory (those reminder-threads and leaf-skeletons of so much miserable stuff), there rests no lovelier legend than this from the cloister of Corbey--that when the Angel of Death had to take away therefrom a spiritual brother, he laid, as a sign of his coming, a white lily in his pew. Would that I had this superstition! Our gentle Genius imitated the Death-angel and said to the little one: "When we find a lily we shall die soon after." How, after that, did the heaven-longing child, who had never seen a lily, seek everywhere to find one! Once, when his Genius had pictured to him the Genius of the Universe, not as a metaphysical Robinet's puzzle-image, but as the greatest and best man on earth; a fragrance never before present floated around it. The little child feels, but does not see; he stepped out into the cloister and--there lay three lilies. He does not know them, these white June-children; but the Genius, enraptured, takes them from him and says: "Those are lilies, they come from heaven; now we shall soon die." Long years after, the sight of a lily always revived the old thrill of emotion in Gustavus's heart, and surely one day in his actual death hour a lily will hover before him as the last gleaming quarter of the waning moon-earth.
The Genius proposed to himself to let him, on the first of June, his birthday, come up out of the earth. But by way of stimulating his soul to a higher (perhaps too high a) degree, he let him in the last week experience still two holy vigils of death. That is to say, as he had already pictured to him beforehand the blisses of heaven,i. e., of the earth, with voice and face, especially the glories of the heavenly and spheral music, so now he ended with the intelligence, that often even to dying men, who were not yet gone up, this echo of the human heart sounded down, and that they then died the sooner because those tones dissolved the tender heart. Into the ear of the little one, music, that poesy of the air, had never yet entered. His teacher had long since made a so-called death-song; in this Gustavus naturally referred everything it said of the second life to the first, and they read it often without singing it. But in the last week all at once for the first time the Genius began to transfigure his mild didactic voice into the still softer singing-voice of the Moravian choral music, and to deliver the yearning death-song to the accompaniment of a mountain-bugle--that flute of longing--which he had arranged to have blown overhead; and the long-drawn adagio wails penetrated to their ears and hearts through the muffling earth like a warm rain....
In Gustavus's eye stood the first tear of joy--his heart turned over--he believed, even now he was dying of the tones.
O music! Lingering echo from a remote world of harmony! Sigh of the angel within us! When the word is speechless, and the embrace and the eye, even the weeping one, and when our dumb hearts lie solitary behind the grating of the breast; O, then it is through thee alone they cry to each other in their prisons, and their distant sighs meet and mingle and cheer them in their wilderness!
As at a real death, so in this mimetic one, the Genius led his pupil's approach toward heaven on the step-ladder of the five senses. He invested the semblance of death, to the advantage of the reality, with all possible charms, and Gustavus will certainly die one day more rapturously than one of us. While others bring us to see hell open, he promised him, that, like a Stephen, on his dying day he should see heaven open already, even before he ascended into it. And this actually occurred. Their subterranean valley of Jehoshaphat had beside the afore-mentioned cellar stairs a long, horizontal cross-passage, opening at the foot of the mountain out into the valley and the village which lay therein, and barred up at certain intervals by two doors. In the night before the first of June, when only the white sickle of the moon hung in the horizon, and like an old visage gray with age, turned in the blue night toward the hidden sun, he had arranged that in the midst of a prayer these doors should imperceptibly be thrown open--and now, Gustavus, for the first time in thy life, and on thy knees, thou lookest out into the broad theatre, nine million square miles broad, of human doings and sufferings; but only just as we in the nightly years of childhood and under the veil wherewith a mother guarded us from the flies, so dost thou glance out into the sea of night which spreads out before thee into immensity with swinging blossoms and shooting fire-flies, that seem to move among the stars, and with the whole multitudinous movement of creation! O, thou happy Gustavus! this night-piece shall remain long years after in thy soul, as a green island that has gone down in the sea, it shall lie encamped behind deep shadows and look yearningly at thee as a long past joyous eternity.... But after a few minutes the Genius folded him in his arms and veiled the eager eyes in his bosom; imperceptibly the heavenly gates swung to again and snatched his spring-time away.
In twelve hours he will be standing in the midst of it; but I am already oppressed with suspense as I draw nearer and nearer to this mild resurrection. It moves me, not merely because only one single time in my life can I have such a birthday, worthy of heaven, as Gustavus's, rise and set in my soul, a day whose fire I feel in my pulse, and of which only a faint reflection falls upon this paper--nor yet merely for the reason that presently the Genius withdraws, unknown both to author and to reader; but chiefly on this account, that I am to cast my Gustavus out of the still diamond mine, where the diamond of his heart formed itself so transparent and so brilliant, and so without spot or flaw, into the hot world which will soon hold up to it its concave mirror and crumble it to pieces; from his dead calm of the passions out into the so-called heaven, where by the side of the saints walk fully as many of the reprobate. But as he will then be at liberty also to gaze upon the face of great nature, it is not, after all, his fate alone that makes me anxious, but mine and that of others, for I reflect through how much rubbish our teachers drag our inner man as a malefactor before he is permitted to stand upright! Ah, had a Pythagoras, instead of the Latin one and the Syrian History, let our heart become a softly tremblingÆolian Harp, on which Nature should play and express her feelings, and not an alarmingfire-drumof all passions--how far--since Genius, but never Virtue, has limits, and everything pure and good can grow still purer--might we not have risen!
Just as Gustavus waits over a night, so will I postpone my picture one night that I may give it to-morrow with full rapture of soul.
Four Priests stand in the broad cathedral of nature and pray at God's altars: the mountains:--the ice-gray Winter with his snow-white surplice--the in-gathering Autumn with sheaves under his arm, which he lays on God's altar that men may take them--the fiery youth, Summer, who toils till night in bringing his offerings--and, finally, the child-like Spring, with his white church decoration of lilies and blossoms, who, like a child, strews flowers and blossom-cups around the lofty spirit, and in whose prayer all that hear it join. And for thechildrenof men Spring is surely the fairest priest.
This flower-priest was the first the little Gustavus beheld at the altar. Before sunrise on the first of June (down below it was evening) the Genius knelt down in silence and offered up with his eyes and mute, trembling lips a prayer for Gustavus, which spread out its wings over his whole untried life. A flute breathed out overhead a tender, loving call, and the Genius said: "It is calling us up out of the earth toward heaven; come with me, my Gustavus." The little one trembled for joy and fear. The flute sounds on. They go up the nocturnal passage of the Jacob's-ladder. Two anxious hearts almost crush with their beatings the breasts that hold them. The Genius pushes open the doors, behind which stands the world, and lifts his child out on to the earth and under the heavens.... And now the high waves of the living sea clap their hands together above Gustavus. With choking breath, with compressed eyelids, with overwhelmed soul, he stands before the illimitable face of nature, and clings trembling more and more closely to his Genius.... But when, after the first shock of amazement, he had flung open, torn open his soul to these streams; when he felt the thousand arms with which the lofty Soul of the Universe clasped him to itself; when he was able to see the green, tumultuous flowery life round about him, and the nodding lilies, which seemed to him more living than his, and when he feared he should tread the trembling flower to death; when his eye, cast upward again, sank in the depth of heaven, the opening of infinity; and when he shrank with apprehension of the breaking down of the dark red mountain piles moving along through the heavens and the lands floating over head; when he saw the mountains resting like new earths on ours; and when he witnessed the endless life stirring around him, the feathered life flying along with the cloud, the humming life at his feet, the golden, crawling life on all leaves, the live arms and heads of the giant trees all beckoning to him; and when the morning wind seemed to him the great breath of a coming Genius, and when the fluttering foliage whispered, and the apple tree threw upon his cheek a cold leaf; when, finally, his eye, moving heavily under its burden, let itself be borne on the white wings of a butterfly, which, soundless and solitary, balanced above gay flowers and hung like a silvery auricula[12]to the broad green leaf.... then did the heavens begin to burn, the trailing edge of her mantle blazed off from the fleeing night, and on the rim of the earth, like a crown of God fallen from the divine throne, lay theSun. "There stands God!" cried Gustavus; and with dazzled eye and mind, and with the greatest prayer which the bosom of a ten-year-old child ever conceived, he flung himself headlong upon the flowers....
Only open thy eyes again, thou darling! Thou art no longer gazing into the glowing globe of lava; thou art lying on the overshadowing breast of thy mother, and her loving heart in that bosom is thy Sun and thy God--for the first time thou seest the ineffably gracious, womanly and maternal smile, for the first time hearest the parental voice; for the first two blessed ones who came to meet thee in heaven are thy parents. O heavenly home! The sun beams, all dew-drops sparkle beneath it, eight tears of joy descend with the milder image of the sun, and four human beings stand blissful and touched with emotion on an earth which lies so far from heaven! Veiled Destiny! will our death be like that of Gustavus? Veiled destiny! that sittest behind our earth and behind a mask and lea vest us timeto be--ah! when death dissolves us and a great Genius has lifted us out of the vault into heaven, then when its suns and joys overpower our soul, wilt thou give us also there a familiar human breast, on which we may open our feeble eyes? O Destiny! dost thou give us again, what here we can never forget? No eye will be directed to this page, which has nothing there to weep over and nothing there it yearns to meet again: ah, will it, after this life, full of dead ones, meet no well-known form, to which we can say: Welcome? ...
Fate stands dumb behind the mask; the human tear lies dark upon the grave; the sun shines not into the tear.--But in Immortality and before the face of God our loving heart dies not.
The state of astonishment into which Gustavus had, all day long by one object after another, been wrought up, and the loss of sleep, ended his first heavenly day with a feverish evening, which he would have had to relieve by a gush of tears, even without any other reason. But he had one: his Genius had, during the tumult in the garden, been snatched away from the darling with a speechless kiss, and had left nothing behind but a leaf to the mother. That is, he had cut a leaf of note-paper into two halves; the one contained the dissonances of the melody and the questions of the text thereto, on the other stood the solutions and the answers. The dissonant half was to come into the hands of his Gustavus; the other he kept. "I and my friend," said he, "shall one day recognize each other thereby in the world's wilderness; in the fact, that he has questions, to which I have the answers." The poodle too, which was every day growing bigger, he took with him.... Where shall we see thee again, unknown, beautiful enthusiast? Thou art all unaware how thy orphaned pupil cries and sobs for thee, and how the new, star-studded heaven does not please him so much as his chamber-ceiling when thou wast with him, and how the lighted candles transform every apartment to the still cavern in which he had loved thee and thou him. Even so in life's evening we bend down over the graves of our early friends, whom no one mourns but we; till at length a strange youth buries the last old man out of the loving circle; but not a single soul remembers the fair, youthful days of the last old man!
In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes, and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every human being a bird Phœnix; every change in the heavens, every sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.
It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses, which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.
His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.
The wife of the Head-forester, von Knör, had brought a lot of Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister touched a wine-glass, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.
But now when for the benefit or so many spectators the wondrous creature was to come forth, behold! he was--gone. Every corner was dusted out, long-lost things were found, every place was screamed into, every nook and every bush--no Gustavus! The Captain, whose first stage of distress was always a kind of anger, let the whole expectant sisterhood sit there with eyes wide open; but the Captain's lady, whose distress took hold of tenderer parts of her nature, drew her seat close up to them for sympathy. But when all anxious, inquiring, running faces came back more and more disconsolate, and when they actually found behind the open castle-gate the plucked flowers which the little fellow had stuck into his little shaded bed, and which were still moist with his sprinkling, then were the faces of the parents darkened with despair. "Ah! the angel has plunged into the Rhine," said she, and he said nothing to the contrary. Atanothertime he would have stamped such anon sequiturunder foot, for the Rhine ran half a league from the castle; but here the reasoner in both was desperate anxiety, which makes far wider leaps than hope. I spoke just now ofanothertime, therefore, because I know what the Captain's way usually was, namely, to be, from very compassion, excited against the sufferer himself. Never, for instance, did his look express a stronger curse against his wife than when she was sick (and a single swift globule of blood would upset her); she must not murmur in the least; and when that was obeyed, she must not sigh; that done, she must not even make a sorrowful face; and if she obeyed all these directions she must not, in fact, be sick. He had the folly of idle and genteel people, he would always be jolly.
But here, when for once his pot of luck lay in fragments, another's sigh sweetened his own and his wrath at the careless troop of servants and at the dry sheep and aftermath of the sisterhood.
When the child had stayed out all night and the whole of the next forenoon, and when they actually found his little hat in the woods on the carriage-road, then did the stings of anxiety grow into the festering pains of inflicted wounds. There is no agitation of the soul against which it is so hard to bring an effective argument as against anxiety: I have, therefore, for a year and a day ceased to attempt any; I just willingly admit the worst it urges and then simply assail the next inward emotion which may grow out of the apprehended worst with the question, "and what if it should come?"
Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodpecker scared away, in the effort to find a head for the hat, but in vain; and on the third day the Captain, whose face was an etching-plate of agony, wandered, without any distinct design of searching, so deeply into the woods that he would hardly have noticed the swift passing through the thicket of a traveling carriage, set out with trunks and servants, had not, issuing from it like a thunder-clap of gladness, the voice of his lost son startled his soul. He runs after it, the carriage shoots ahead, and out in the open ground he sees it already sending up a cloud of dust beyond his castle. Beside himself he comes up storming into the castle-yard to start in pursuit of it and--let it go. For up at the house-door stood the inmates of the castle who had suddenly run together and were now gathered in a knot around Gustavus, the castle dogs barked without having any clearly defined reason, and all were talking and questioning in such a way that one could not properly hear from the child a single answer. The carriage as it whirled by had let him out. On his neck hung by a black ribbon his portrait. His eyes were red and moist with the pangs of homesickness. He told of long, long houses, which he took streets to be, and of his little sister who had played with him, and of his new hat; but no soul would have been the wiser for all this had not the cook spied a card which had fallen at his feet. This the Captain read, and saw thathewas not to read it, but his wife. He deciphered and translated it out of the Italian and the female handwriting thus:
"Can a mother, then, excuse herself to a mother, for having so long kept her child from her? Even if you do not forgive me my fault, still I cannot repent it. I found your dear little one three days ago wandering about in the woods, where I stole him into my carriage, in order to save him from worse thieves, and to find out his parents. Ah, I will just confess it to you: I should have taken him with me, even without either of these excuses. O, not because of his heavenly beauty, but because he looks so perfectly like, even to his hair, my dear, lost Guido; I can, even now, hardly give him up. Ah, it is already many years since fate in a strange manner snatched my dearest child, living, out of my bosom. Yours comes back to-day--mine, never!--Pardon the neck-pendant. The portrait you will take to be his, so like is he to my son: but it is really that of my Guido. His own I had also painted for me, and keep it, in order to have a duplicate image of my good child. Should I one day come to see your Gustavus, in his full bloom, I should gaze long upon him; I should say to myself: so must my Guido be now looking; so much innocence will he, too, have in his eyes; so very pleasing will he, also, be.--Ah, my little daughter weeps that her playmate is to leave her--and I do too; she gives back only a brother: but I, a son. May you and he be happier!--Excuse me from giving my name."
They all fell to guessing who the authoress could be. The Captain alone looked sad, and said nothing. I know not whether from sorrow at the recollection of his first lost son, or because he thought as I, in fact, do about the whole affair. I conjecture, namely, that the lost Guido is just his own child; and the correspondent is the beloved whom the commercial agent Röper had wrested out of his hands. I shall give my reason, by and by. Gustavus's beauty may be demonstrated, eithera priori(by reasoning downward from cause to effect) or, secondly, by a reverse process, from consequent to antecedent. His forcing-house, in which he was trained and hidden, very naturally bleached his lily-skin to a white ground on which two pale cheek-roses, or only their reflection and the darker and denser rosebud of the upper lip had lighted. His eye was the open heaven which you happen upon in a thousand cases of five-year-old children, and only in ten of people fifty years old; and this eye was, moreover, veiled or beautified by long eye-lashes, and by a somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic haze. Finally, neither exertion nor passion had struck their marking-axe and its sharp letters into this fair tree, nor had the death sentence which was to announce its fall, been cut into its bark. But all beauty is soft, hence, the fairest people are the most tranquil; hence, violent labor distorts poor children and poor races.
But the year has not yet come, in which I can prove the beauty of Gustavus by thea posterioriprocess.
For as the auctioneer was at that time my most intimate friend, he executed for my pleasure the little trick of setting up for sale the paintings and engravings precisely on a day, when, on account of the masquerade, not a soul of the great world of Unterscheerau came out to the auction, I, alone, excepted; as expiatory payment for the same, I had to endure a thousand things. The whole town and suburb had contributed to this rubbish-heap of furniture, and was seller and buyer at once. In this auction appeared all European potentates, but wretchedly drawn and colored; and a nobleman ofbon sensset up his two parents and was fain to pass them off as good knee-pieces (or half-length portraits);--in Rome, inversely, parents sold their children, onlyin naturâ. The nobleman hoped I would bid on his papa and mamma; but I overbade on nothing, except the portrait of Gustavus, which was knocked off to me. The nobleman was named Röper, of whom I have mentioned above, that he on one and the same day became husband and step-father.
And here, verily, thou hangest, Gustavus, opposite me and my writing-table, and when I am thinking upon anything, my eye always falls upon thee. Many blame me, my little hero, that I have nailed thee up here between Shakespeare and Winkelmann (by Bause); but hast thou not--a thing few think of--an arched nose, on which rest high and weighty thoughts; such a one as under the hand of death is often bent more beautifully; and hast thou not under the bony architrave a broad eye through which as through a triumphal gate nature enters into the soul, and a dome-crowned house of the spirit, and all else that entitles and enables thee to hold up thy head beside thy copper-plate neighbors?
The reader ought to know (but it occurs farther on) what obliges me just now, suddenly to finish and close the present sector.
I confess here, our enlightened age should be named an adulterous generation. I certainly said once at the marketplace in Marseilles, that I held the miserable thing, matrimonial infidelity, to be right. Even long before I got to Munich, I said one ought to annex to the Metropolitan Church, of the marriage bed, a chapel of ease--in Upper Saxony I said, if that countess went on bearing for a whole year something daily: then with countesses even now, at least theforegoneyear were to be had--in the ten German circles I certainly expressed myself in ten different ways:--But it was not then in place anywhere to expound the matter clearly out of physiology, but only here.
It wasSanctorius[13]who seated himself upon a Delphic night stool and there sat out the truth, that man got himself clothed upon every eleven years with a new body--the old one, like the German body politic, wearing away piece by piece till there remains of the whole mummy not so much as an apothecary will give, shaved down minutely, in a tea-spoon.Bernouillicontradicted Sanctorius up and down and showed us that he had blundered, for not in eleven, but in three years, the one of the twin brothers evaporated and the other crystallized. In short French and Russians change body oftener than the shirt on the body, and a Province is getting new bodies and a new religious Provincial jointly in three years as aforesaid.
The matter is by no means indifferent. For it is accordingly impossible that a baldhead, who celebrated his marriage jubilee should point to a bit of skin on his whole body as big as a penny and remark: "With this scrap of skin I stood 25 years ago at the altar and was, together with the rest, coupled to my jubilant wife here." That the jubilee-king cannot possibly do. The marriage ring, to be sure, has not dropped off, but the ring finger which it encircled has, long ago. In fact it is a trick beyond all tricks, and I appeal to other Consistorial secretaries. For the poor bride goes up joyfully under the bed canopy with thestatua curulisof a bodily bridegroom and thinks--what knows she of good physiology?--that she has in the body something solid, a piece of iron, an article of real estate, in short a head with hairs, of which she can one day say, they have grown gray on mine and on my cap! Such is her hope; meanwhile in the midst of her hoping the rogue of a body works off its whole set of members, as a student his pawned student's goods, in the course of three years, in infinitesimal particles in mist and darkness. If she turns round on New Year's Eve--there lies in the marriage bed beside her a mere wax cast or second edition which the former body has left of itself, and in which there remains no longer a single leaf of the old one. What now--when the cubic contents of the bridal bed and of the marriage bed are so different--is a wife to think of the whole matter! I mean, if,e. g., a whole female consisting of (e. g. the Lady Consistorial President, the lady Vice-President, the lady Consistorial Secretary) after three years finds upon the pillow an entirely different male Consistory, from what the marriage promised this dissolved one should be: what course is a woman to take, who, if she is a consistorial half, knows right wellquid juris? She, I say, who must have heard a hundred times over at the dinner table, that such an absconding of the male body is a cursedmalicious abandonmentordesertio malitiosa, which entirely releases her from her marriage vows--and in fact such a straw widow may actually have read Lutherde causis matrimoniiand have inferred therefrom that he does not forbid a maliciously deserted wife after a year or half a year to contract a new marriage. To betake herself to the aforesaid new marriage will manifestly be the first duty and design of such a deserted one; but as the new extant body of a husband cannot help the evaporation of its predecessor, accordingly, rather than distress him, she will do it without his knowledge and without vindictive feeling--perhaps when he is at the Exchange--or in the pulpit--or at the fair--or on board ship--or behind the session table or abroad somewhere.
Meanwhile the husband is no fool, but has always enough of physiology about him to know that the wife also changes her body as often as her maids; consequently he needs not to watch any chance.Nov. 22c.25 of itself hands him the right of divorce, if she has run away from him for a night; but here the Consistorial Counselloress has absolutely blown away for ever and moreover repeats this evaporation every three years--she, who, nevertheless, according to "Lange's Clerical Rights," which the Consistorial Counsellor has on his book-shelf, would be obliged to follow him, if he were banished the country, even though, in the marriage-contract she had reserved the right to stay at home. Thus speaks Lange to husbands on the point. In the great world, where true chastity and universal knowledge, including of course physiology, are at home, the point has long since been treated with intelligence and propriety, and conscientiousness has been carried to great length. For as, in that sphere, a husband three years after the wedding-feast no longer expects to find in his spouse an apothecary's ounce of blood, nor a thin vein in which it ran, remaining of the old one; as, therefore, he thinks to find again the emigrated parts of his good lady much sooner and more surely in any other than in herself; as, accordingly, he must, much rather, regard love for his partner as infidelity to her and with her--(and, strictly taken, it is even so)--: it follows now, that the question is mainly one of pure morality; he, therefore, leaves to that assemblage of veins, nervous ganglia, finger-nails and nobler parts, which one callsin totohis wife--leaves her (or it) his name, half his credit, and half his children, because, on the whole, in the great world, one does not like publicly to dissolve public connections, and prefers, at last, to walk in a thousand air-woven fetters; butthishis respect for morality and public sentiment does not allow him, to have one and the same dwelling--table--society with a wife who has another body; he does not even (which, perhaps, is being too scrupulous) like to appear with her in public and refrains at least in his house from all that of which he or Origen made themselves incapable.
There are miserable, faded pulpits, which may object to my position, that the wedded souls remain when the bodies have evaporated. For with the soul (therefore with the memory, the thinking faculty, the moral principle, etc.), at the present day there is little or no union in wedlock, but only with that which hangs round it. Secondly, it may be learned of any materialist on the philosophic exchange, that the soul is nothing but a sucker of the body, which, therefore, with both man and wife, passes away simultaneously with the body. One need not, however, take that ground, but one need only concur with Hume, who writes that there is no such thing as a soul, but merely a collection of ideas that cling together like toads'-spawn and so creep through the brain and think themselves. Under such circumstances the bridal pair may thank God, if their pair of coupled souls will hold together only as long as the two pairs of dancing-pumps at the marriage-ball. One sees this too the forenoon after the honeymoon.
Therefore, as has been said, no Canonist can put off the week in which man and wife may lawfully proceed to breach of marriage vows, longer than to the fourth year after betrothal; only for people of the world and of standing, this is hard and too rigorous, especially if they know from their "Keil" (the anatomist) that in a year the old body has entirely thawed away--a miserable sixteen pound avoirdupois alone excepted. Hence, it has often been my idea, that if I should bring my breach of marriage into the very first year (as many do) I should really be unfaithful to only a few pounds of my consort, (who weighs 107)--namely the sixteen pounds that still remained.
On the same exchange of bodies whereon one grounds his breach of marriage vows, must the Consistory ground its rule of divorce. For, as people often remain together, in open wedlock, nine, eighteen years after marriage, whereas all physiologists know that there are two new married bodies in the case, and without priestly consecration, accordingly the Consistory is now bound to look into it and interfere and divorce the two foreign bodies by a decree or two. Hence one will never hear of a conscientious Consistory's making any difficulty in separating Christians who are already joined in wedlock; but on the other hand one will quite as seldom hear of a case in which it divorces those who have merely promised marriage, without the greatest difficulty; and very naturally; for in the former case, that of a long marriage, true infidelity is to be averted by the bill of divorcement, because there are uncoupled bodies; buthere, in the case of betrothal, the bodies which have made the engagement are not yet fully present, and they must first live for a long time in wedlock, before they are ripe for divorce. This is the true solution of an apparent contradiction, which has already misled so many weak minds to regard us all in Consistory as greedy of perquisites, and me as the marker, and our green session-boards as green billiard tables, around which President and Councillors skip with long queues, to play out our games; ah! besides, a Consistorial committee cuts more pens than coins money.
Why, on the whole, do not the Pastors report to us every couple in their parishes that have cohabited over three years, that they may be divorced at the proper time? Such a divorce, for which no further grounds are needed than this, that the two people have lived together a great while, has, indeed, in all countries no other design than that of allowing them to be afterward reunited regularly with their renewed bodies. The Consistory and I fare most accursedly in the matter, if things are not somewhat mended, when the new minister mounts the throne. Verily, such a spiritual administrative college often applies the long saw, and saws the marriage blocks or beds, in which the wedded pairs had lain for twenty-one years, who in so long a time had been seven times at least (infidelity and divorce falling due every three years) been proper subjects for infidelity and divorce; what forfeiture of perquisites, since we must needs multiply four-fold the costs of divorce, which we might have multiplied seven-fold! Besides such liquidation of divorce-expenses amounts to little, because it is notoriously moderated and, in fact, by the Consistory itself. Besides, one practises in the Consistorial Chamber the forethought and afterthought, by which I always, after fifteen or twenty years, draw out again the bill of perquisites, which the divorced pair had already paid, and hand it anew to the Consistorial messenger and collector, not so much for the purpose of getting the fees twice over (which is a secondary matter) as to duplicate the receipt, in case the divorced couple should have lost the first, and also to guard them against a third payment. One would make everything easy for the couple, by allowing the payment to be made in several and small installments.
... And to-day is three years since I too was joined in marriage.... but the straw-wreath oration on that occasion was too poor to repeat....